State sets public meeting on Birth Center closing

Jun. 30—BEVERLY — The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has scheduled a public meeting on Beverly Hospital's plans to close the North Shore Birth Center. The hearing will be held July 20 at 6 p.m. at the Vittori Rocci Post, 143 Brimbal Ave., in Beverly.

Beverly Hospital and parent company Beth Israel Lahey Health announced last month they plan to close the North Shore Birth Center on Sept. 8. The announcement has sparked a campaign to save the center, including a protest with more than 150 people outside the hospital and an online petition with more than 3,000 signatures.

The center is staffed by midwives and is the only free-standing birth center in eastern Massachusetts. Hospital officials have said they are closing it because they cannot find enough midwives to work there due to a workforce shortage.

The public hearing on the closure is required as part of MassDPH's oversight when a hospital decides to discontinue a service that it is licensed to provide. But the state cannot legally require a hospital to keep a service open. MassDPH says on its website that it can "ensure that measures have been put in place to minimize the impact on the community and address concerns that have been brought to DPH's attention."

State Sen. Joan Lovely, of Salem, said the hospital is planning to go through with the closure despite the urging of local legislators and other officials to keep it open when they met recently with Tom Sands, president of Beverly Hospital and Addison Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester, which are both part of Beth Israel Lahey Health.

The meeting included Lovely; Gloucester Mayor Greg Verga, state Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr of Gloucester; state Reps. Jamie Belsito, Sally Kerans, Jerry Parisella and Paul Tucker; and Beverly Mayor Mike Cahill and City Council President Julie Flowers.

Lovely said the delegation asked hospital officials to make the closure temporary and move the midwife services to the hospital until the workforce shortage eases, keeping alive the option to reopen the center at a later date. The Birth Center is located on the Beverly Hospital campus.

"We were hoping they would pause for maybe a year and let us see what the workforce shortage would look like a year from now," Lovely said. "But it looks like they're moving forward with it, and, legislatively, we can't stop it."

Lovely said hospital officials said they would support the creation of an independent, nonprofit birth center on the North Shore. She noted there's an allocation for $100,000 in the state budget to take a look at opening an independent birth center in Dorchester.

Rebecca Hains, one of the leaders of the Campaign to Save the North Shore Birth Center, said the idea of creating a nonprofit birth center on the North Shore has been floated, but efforts now are focused on saving the current Birth Center.

"My understanding is that nothing concrete has been done in that regard because I think the vast majority of people would like to see Beverly Hospital continue to operate the Birth Center," Hains said.

In a statement, Sands said, "We understand that there is interest in pursuing alternatives to Beverly Hospital's operation of a free-standing birth center, and would always welcome conversations to explore how we can support health care needs in the community."

In a filing with DPH, Sands cited statistics showing that more than 70% of Birth Center patients over the last three years have delivered in Beverly Hospital rather than at the Birth Center. For that reason, he said, the hospital "does not anticipate a negative impact on patient access" following the closure.

But supporters of the Birth Center said not all of the center's patients who gave birth in the hospital did so by choice. Beverly resident Brittany Gomes said she planned to deliver at the Birth Center, but the facility was closed on the day she went into labor last October so she had to deliver in the hospital.

Gomes said she was "absolutely devastated" by news of the center's closing.

"Women should have a choice for when and where they want to birth," she said. "I call it a unicorn. It's really a one-of-a-kind place. I can't imagine it being taken away from future birthing people."

Hains said she is disappointed that hospital officials have been unmoved by the public's effort to save the Birth Center.

"There's no accountability," she said. "They're saying, 'There's no mechanism to stop us.' Is that what you want from a community hospital? It's giving people locally a very, very bad feeling about how that system operates, which in this case is not in the community's best interest."

Staff Writer Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2535, by email at pleighton@salemnews.com, or on Twitter at @heardinbeverly.

Staff Writer Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2535, by email at pleighton@salemnews.com, or on Twitter at @heardinbeverly.